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Almost every large tech company with email, search, and app capacity denied reports in The Washington Post and the Guardian each of which claimed that the U.S. government tracked the activities of citizens as a way to detect terrorism or other threats to national security. Companies which included Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL), Google (NASDAQ: GOOG), Facebook (NASDAQ: FB) and Yahoo! (NASDAQ: YHOO) denied the reporting by the two papers which was picked up across the media world

People are now left to ponder whether important media misstated the extent of the government's "spying" or whether much of the rumored "spying" actually happened. And, they are left to decide if major media were right or wrong about which companies were targeted by the government for data collection

A sampling of some reactions:

From Reuters:

With regard to the Post

Some of the companies named in the article - Google, Apple, Yahoo and Facebook - immediately denied that the government had "direct access" to their central servers. Microsoft said it does not voluntarily participate in any government data collection and only complies "with orders for requests about specific accounts or identifiers.

James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, said the report contained "numerous inaccuracies."

The NYT:

The federal government has been secretly collecting information on foreigners overseas for nearly six years from the nation's largest Internet companies like Google, Facebook and, most recently, Apple, in search of national security threats, the director of national intelligence confirmed Thursday night.